Sign in

Blue Smoke

Barbecue aficionados are like baseball nerds or Elizabethan scholars: they know too much and have too many strong opinions. By opening this upscale barbecue joint, off Park Avenue South, Danny Meyer, the man behind Union Square Café, is just asking for trouble.

Blue Smoke certainly smells right, despite an elaborate ventilation system and a neighbor-friendly smokestack fifteen stories up. A half-cord of split applewood stands outside the kitchen doors, ready for the smoker. Nonetheless, the place has the feel of a chain restaurant in a converted warehouse on the outskirts of Toronto. Maybe it’s the waitstaff’s Blue Smoke T-shirts, made by Timberland and offered for sale alongside bottles of the house barbecue sauce, or the restaurant’s proximity to the global headquarters of Credit Suisse First Boston, which appears to be supplying much of the clientele.

Meyer seems to want to make barbecue pristine; instead he’s made it prissy. You get dishrags for napkins, but nothing sloppy enough to justify putting them to use. The ribs are smoked for seven hours. Whether that’s too much or too little, they’re as dry and drab as ham (not that there’s anything wrong with ham). The hot links and pickles come neatly sliced. The brisket is parched, the pulled pork moist but underpulled. “Oh, you have to try the macaroni and cheese,” a waitress said, and it turned out to be just a cut above Kraft (not that there’s anything wrong with that, either). Coleslaw, pit beans, creamed spinach, collard greens: they are what they are. The foie gras with jalapeño marmalade made momentary sense only because Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” happened to be playing on the jukebox, but it revealed itself to be fey once the Meters kicked in.

It doesn’t seem right to complain about a place where you can gorge on plates of meat and pints of beer, start off with fry bread and finish with banana-cream pie. But truth is, while bad barbecue can be fine in the way that even the worst hot dogs or milkshakes usually are, mediocre barbecue that is expensive and pretentious is no good at all. (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $12-$23.)

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.